Nor had she been in a condition to delegate this act of concealment to another.

Who, then, had been the intermediary in this business?
The question was no longer a latent one in my mind; it was an insistent one, compelling me either to discredit Arthur's explanation (in which case anything might be believed of him) or to accept for good and all this new theory that some person of unknown identity had played an accessory's part in this crime, whose full burden I had hitherto laid upon the shoulders of the impetuous Carmel.

Either hypothesis brought light.

I began to breathe again the air of hope, and if observed at that moment, must have presented the odd spectacle of a man rejoicing in his own shame and accepting with positive uplift, the inevitable stigma cast upon his honour by the suggestive sentence just hurled at him by an indignant witness.
The point raised by the district attorney having been ruled upon and sustained by the court, Mr.Moffat made no effort to carry his inquiries any further in the direction indicated; but I could see, with all my inexperience of the law and the ways of attorneys before a jury, that the episode had produced its inevitable result, and that my position, as a man released from suspicion, had received a shock, the results of which I might yet be made to feel.
A moment's pause followed, during which some of Mr.Moffat's nervousness returned.

He eyed the prisoner doubtfully, found him stoical and as self-contained as at the beginning of his examination, and plunged into a topic which most people had expected him to avoid.